“But the captains all knew,” Bren surmised. “Sabin was there. She had to know the station wasn’t dead. Anybody on the bridge, any of the techs, they had to know, all along, didn’t they?” That had been a question before they launched on this mission. It loomed darker and darker now, damning all chance of honesty between executive and crew.
“It’s all numbers readout on those screens,” Jase said. ”You get what the station transmits. Or doesn’t transmit. Or if it feeds you a lie—you’d have that on your screen, wouldn’t you? I’m not sure that all the ops techs on the bridge knew. Some had to. But it’s possible some didn’t.”
More and more sinister, Bren thought, wishing that at some time, at any convenient time, the late captain Ramirez had leveled with his atevi allies… and his own crew.
“I’ll imagine, too,” Jase went on, “that the minute we got into the solar system and got any initial visual inkling there was trouble, bridge showed a succession of still images from then on out—in space, you can’t always tell live from still. I’ll imagine, for charity’s sake, that Ramirez ran the whole thing off some archive tape and a still shot and nobody else knew. He might have been the only captain on the bridge during the investigation: you just don’t budge from quarters until you get the all-clear, and it didn’t come for us belowdecks for hours. Maybe he didn’t tell anybody but his own techs. Maybe the other captains got his still image and they didn’t leave their executive meeting to find out. I can construct a dozen scenarios that might have applied. But I’ll tell you I’m not happy with anything I can imagine. The more I think about it, I’m sure Sabin had to know.”
“You docked at the station, for God’s sake.”
“Tethered. Simple guides for fueling. We’re not the space shuttle.”
Not the space shuttle. Not providing passenger video on the approach. Not providing a cushy pressurized and heated tube link.
Entry through the null-g mast, where even a trained eye couldn’t easily detect a lie.
“There’s another tape,” Bren said, on that surmise. “There’s got to be some log record where the station contacted Phoenix and gave Ramirez the order not to let the crew know there was anybody alive.”
“You know, I’d like to think that was where the orders originated,” Jase said calmly. “And I earnestly tried to find a record to prove that theory. But I couldn’t. My level of skill, I’m afraid. Took me eleven months to break this much out. I know a lot more now than I did about the data system. But you get into specific records by having keys. I’ve cracked a few of them. Not all. Not the policy level. Not the level where Guild orders might be stored. And the senior captain isn’t about to give them up and I’m not about to ask.”
“You can’t erase a log entry, can you?”
“You’d think. But at this point—we’ve rebuilt a lot of the ship’s original systems, over the centuries, and I’m not sure that’s the truth any longer. At my level of expertise, no. Not possible. If there’s a key that allows that—it rests higher than I can reach. Maybe it sits in some file back on old Earth, that launched us. Maybe Sabin has it. I don’t.”
Jase was Ramirez’s appointment, and Sabin hadn’t approved his having the post.
And the crew, the general, non-bridge crew—who’d all but mutinied to get them launched on this rescue mission—if they saw this tape, they were going to be far faster on the uptake than a groundling ambassador. There was a reasonable case to be made that the Pilots’ Guild itself, in charge of Reunion Station, was behind all the trouble and all the lies and all the deception. There was a reasonable, even a natural case to be made that the alien hostility that had wrecked the station was directly the Guild’s fault, and not Ramirez’s. But believing the old Guild was the sole culpable agency required suspending a lot of possibilities, because the station wasn’t mobile. The station wasn’t gadding about space poking into other people’s solar systems.
And the ship’s executive hadn’t talked. Hadn’t breached the official lie that Reunion Station was dead.
Nine years without talking? Nine years for that many people on the bridge to keep a secret from their friends and relations among the crew?
Mospheirans never could have done it, Bren thought. Then: atevi… possibly. And ship-folk—
He watched Jase watch the tape, thinking that all the years he’d known Jase hadn’t gotten him through all the layers of Jase’s reticence. Even with friendship. Even with shared experience. In some ways ship-folk were as alien to Mospheirans as a Mospheiran could imagine.
And the ease of lies in this sealed steel world of the ship…
They continually heard reports that told them where they were. They imagined stars and space. They imagined progress through the universe.
The ship docked with a station mast, and went null-g. The ship would have been perfectly normal, null-g, even while the station wasn’t. Surviving relatives could have been just the other side of the hull, and crew might not have known.
A very, very different set of perceptions, from certain consoles on the bridge, to those that weren’t involved with that reality. While certain other techs, deep in the inner circles of the ship’s operations, kept secrets until told otherwise—policy. Policy, policy.
The Pilots’ Guild had once run this ship. It was a good question how much it still ran the upper decks. Did the ship work with the old Guild? For the old Guild?
Or for itself, these days? The Pilots’ Guild hadn’t actually consisted of pilots for centuries. Supposedly they’d gone stationside at Reunion, and let the ship’s captains go their way, under their authority in name, if not in fact.
Jase touched a button. Sound came up, the ordinary hoarse whisper of a man’s exerted breathing. “ Almost there, sir ,” a voice said.
“They know where they’re going,” Jase said. “They never ask. They’re about to pass a working airlock. They know in advance certain of the lifts are going to work. There’s no mystery about this, not to them. They’re representing Ramirez and they’re going in to meet with the station authority.”
“And that is Jenrette we’re hearing. The one with the helmet cam.”
“Affirmative.”
Sabin’s man now. Sabin’s sympathy for a man decades in Ramirez’ service, a man too senior to be on a despised junior captain’s staff?
For Jenrette, with, maybe, a whole raft of executive secrets on his conscience, a much more comfortable assignment, that with Sabin.
“Presumably,” Jase said, “Sabin’s thoroughly debriefed him by now, even the things he wouldn’t want to say. So I assume she knows as much out of Jenrette as her imagination prompts her to ask and his sense of the situation lets him answer. Presumably, once we raised the possibility this tape existed, Sabin immediately reviewed it and questioned Jenrette. What else she may have gotten out of Jenrette, I wish I did know.”
“She’s going to know I came up here. She’s going to ask why.”
“True.” Jase picked up a disk from off his desk and gave it to him, tape being in most instances a figure of speech on this ship. “This is a copy. Your copy. Consider—I was aboard when we docked at Reunion. I was belowdecks being lied to like all the rest. I remember how it was. I remember the announcements that we were going in. I remember the solemn announcement that we were going back to Alpha to find out if the rest of the colonists we’d scattered out here had survived—with the implication things were going to change and we were going to patch everything and find a friendly port and then prepare against the possibility of alien invasion at Alpha. Right along with crew, I got behind that promise. I was young. I’d had a peculiar course of study, and I understood I was going to be useful in that approach. I had a notion that was the reason I existed at all; and all during that voyage I bore down on my studies: French and Latin and Chinese and history, a lot of history. Yolanda and I were all impressed, because Ramirez was so incredibly wise as to have had us going down that path in the first place. Wise… bullshit. I’m thirty years old. I’m relatively sure I am. Tell me: why was he so incredibly ahead of the game?”